1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to web forms. More particularly, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for sharing information between HTML forms using a cookie.
2. Related Art
Within a web environment, such as portals, many different types of user interface widgets that take input or state commonly share the same input or state. For example, assume a portal page contains two portlets each of which contains a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) form, and that the HTML forms have duplicate information such as name and address. Currently, a user would enter these fields separately only aided by external utilities such as cut and paste. Although there are a number of techniques to share information between HTML forms, such as explicit beforehand knowledge that two fields in an HTML form are capable of sharing a common value, none of these techniques are abstract enough to facilitate information sharing across independently developed applications that do not have an explicitly prearranged method for sharing data.
Although an “auto-complete” feature is currently available in today's web browsers, it suffers from many problems. For example, it forces a user to choose between many values when filling in a form field (i.e., all the values previously entered in the form field), thus creating an inconvenience for the user. In addition, the values presented by the auto-complete feature for a form field must have been previously entered by a user. Further, a user must start typing in an form field before the auto-complete feature is enabled. Much user intervention is thus required.